pocket-tts is a lightweight text-to-speech application with voice cloning that runs efficiently on standard CPUs. It generates audio from text inputs with low latency and supports cloning voices from wav or safetensors files.
Project overview
A 100M-parameter TTS model designed specifically for CPU execution removes the GPU dependency for local speech generation while delivering approximately 200ms streaming latency. External API or hosted options may also be available.
Project type
Audio & Speech
Use cases
Audio & Speech
Deployment
Refer to project documentation
License
MIT
Best for
Developers who need a self-hosted, CPU-optimized text-to-speech tool with voice cloning and prefer not to depend on GPUs or paid external services.
Key capabilities
Generates audio speech from text inputs efficiently on standard CPUs.
Supports cloning voices from plain wav file inputs or pre-exported safetensors files.
Supports English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish languages.
Provides low latency (~200ms) streaming of generated audio.
Provides a serve command to run a local server with a web interface for generating audio via HTTP requests.
Can handle long text inputs for audio generation.
Allows usage as a simple Python library to generate audio from text.
Limitations and risks
Running this TTS model on the GPU did not observe a speedup compared to CPU execution.
Does not currently support adding silence in the text input to generate pauses.
Voice cloning carries the risk of impersonation or cloning without explicit and lawful consent; verify that any voice sample is used with proper authorization before generating audio.
Getting started
Install via pip install pocket-tts or run with uvx pocket-tts without manual dependency management, then run pocket-tts generate to output a WAV file.
Evidence and sources
README: A lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) application designed to run efficiently on CPUs. Forget about the hassle of using GPUs and web APIs serving TTS models. With Kyutai's Pocket TTS…
README: You can also use `pip install pocket-tts` to install it manually.
README: * Runs on CPU * Small model size, 100M parameters * Audio streaming * Low latency, ~200ms to get the first audio chunk * Faster than real-time, ~6x real-time on a CPU of MacBook A…
Release: v2.1.0
README: The `--voice` argument can also take a plain wav file as input for voice cloning.